Smallscreen

“Is reality television on its last legs?” is a pretty dumb question. But if I had £1 for each time I’m asked it I could make serious inroads into Britain’s swollen government debt. And a good deal of the money would have accrued in the past month, since Channel 4 announced they could do without Big Brother. In fact, reality television has never been stronger—dominating the schedules with narratives at about a tenth the cost of television drama. Telly tsars are no more going to give up on reality television then they are on news, sport or comedy. It’s become one of the ways that television is made.

Reality television is an unscripted show in which members of the public are placed in a predicament and followed by cameras to see how they will react. The phrase arose in the US in the 1990s when media folk were stumped as to how to refer to the hybrid formats pouring out of Europe—Big Brother, Survivor, Wife Swap, Faking It, Supernanny and so on. Reality programmes are essentially formatted documentaries. Commissioners used to send out directors to make a documentary about, say, moving house. The problem was that they had no idea what the production team would come back with. Worse, it was a one-off and they then had to come up with a new idea, then another, and so on. But format the idea and call it Location, Location, Location and you know that each programme will generate you a narrative with a resolution. You can then go on making the same show until the great British public tire of it (ten years in the case of Big Brother, 30 and counting in the case of the Antiques Roadshow).



The most common complaint about reality television is that it is anything but: false, contrived, unreal. This is true up to a point. Reality shows start from a false premise. None of the participants would be there had a producer not invented the situation and persuaded them into it. But what flows from this is often completely “real” as people forget the cameras and react honestly to each other and events as they unfold. This contrasts amusingly with traditional documentary makers who had always purported to be purveyors of the truth. But, while they started with a real situation, their covert manipulations as they filmed and edited meant the end result was often more ersatz than that of the despised reality television show.

A cursory look at this month’s schedules shows how dominant the reality genre has become, across both daytime and primetime: Cash in the Attic, Come Dine With Me, 60 Minute Makeover, Tough Guy or Chicken, The Restaurant, The X Factor. Let’s look a little more closely at three current offerings—the excellent, the good and the poor, starting with the last.

How Clean Is Your House? (Channel 4 8pm Thursday) is a once brilliant format now looking distinctly threadbare. It relies on that familiar crutch, the makeover, and sets its two clucking cleansers the task of sanitising the disgusting homes of feckless people. In the edition I watched, an arthritic, former actor, Timothy, lived in the usual squalor. Kim “my love” Woodburn and Aggie Mackenzie donned their rubber gloves and gave his house a sort of enema. A patronisingly punning voiceover and cod dialogue added up to a show that’s a little past its sell-by date and a touch mouldy—like the food in Timothy’s fridge.

Dragons’ Den (BBC2) falls into the now familiar sub-genre of humiliation-at-the-hands-of-an-acerbic-panel. This edition had would-be entrepreneurs punting organic biscuits, paintbrush cleaners, a toothpaste-tube squeezer, a share in a racehorse, portable goalposts, ice-cream vans and a toy helicopter. The put-downs were brutal and therein lies the joy of it—seeing the deluded brought down to earth. The few that succeeded in attracting investment from the panel seemed to me to be giving away vast chunks of their business for next to nothing.

Then we come to the excellent: The Choir (BBC2) produced by Twenty Twenty and in its second series. Charismatic chorus master Gareth Malone goes to South Oxhey, a deprived area just north of Watford. There our hero sets up a local choir, 170-strong, to engender community spirit. The transformation over four episodes is charming and magical. Pensioner Fred is newly widowed and achingly lonely. The choir becomes his family and he even pairs off with a peroxide blonde. Dee is a black, single mother whose main experience of the area is racial abuse in the street. She sings the choir’s first solo to general acclaim. As the choir performs everything from Oasis to Samuel Barber, I defy you not to sniffle as South Oxhey finds a new purpose. Is it the recession or what? Add Channel 4’s Secret Millionaire to the mix and reality television has come over all positive.